YOSHIDA SHIHO
Like finding river in this room
Like finding river in this room
For Shiho Yoshida, the scenery she saw from an expressway when she was a child left a strong impression on her as the image of Tokyo. The Tokyo Bay Aqua-Line, an expressway she had to pass through on her way to Tokyo from Chiba Prefecture, where she lived, is made up of a tunnel segment that descends down to about 60 meters below sea level and connects Kisarazu City and Kawasaki City in almost a straight line. She remembers clearly the pleasant sensation she felt from the elevation of her eye level after finally getting through the 9.5 kilometer-long Aqua Tunnel—past the Aqua Bridge and the Umihotaru (“sea firefly”) rest area, which marks the transition between the bridge and tunnel segments—and how the factories and buildings visible from the expressway provided a beautiful sight.
In January 2021, Yoshida’s workplace in Tokyo moved to the 10th floor of a building. Before, a dark river with barely any flow was the only thing in sight, but now the view from the 10th floor looked down at a highway and its cars flowing by. The Shuto Expressway (“Metropolitan Expressway”), which opened in 1962 and now stretches 340 kilometers across Tokyo and surrounding areas, follows mostly along a route that was used as the city’s moats and waterways in the past. With this fact at the backdrop of the series, Yoshida attempted to capture the flow of the expressway as an image that would link with the themes of river and water.
Like finding river in this room was created as a series of video works, each about 30 seconds in length, by superimposing the photographs of fishing ponds and rivers taken in Tokyo on live camera footage of the expressway and then capturing the resulting video over water.
